Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning; With Some Account of Dwellers in FairylandBunce, John Thackray
History
Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning; With Some Account of Dwellers in Fairyland
Bunce, John Thackray
Fairy tales -- History and criticism
Altogether, this Fairy Land that we can make for ourselves in a moment,
is a very pleasant and most delightful place, and one which all of us,
young and old, may well desire to get into, even if we have to come back
from it sooner than we like. It is just the country to suit everybody,
for all of us can find in it whatever pleases him best. If he likes
work, there is plenty of adventure; he can climb up mountains of steel,
or travel over seas of glass, or engage in single combat with a giant,
or dive down into the caves of the little red dwarfs and bring up their
hidden treasures, or mount a horse that goes more swiftly than the wind,
or go off on a long journey to find the water of youth and life, or do
anything else that happens to be very dangerous and troublesome. If
he doesn't like work, it is again just the place to suit idle people,
because it is all Midsummer holidays. I never heard of a school in Fairy
Land, nor of masters with canes or birch rods, nor of impositions and
long lessons to be learned when one gets home in the evening. Then the
weather is so delightful. It is perpetual sunshine, so that you may lie
out in the fields all day without catching cold; and yet it is not too
hot, the sunshine being a sort of twilight, in which you see everything,
quite clearly, but softly, and with beautiful colours, as if you were in
a delightful dream.
And this goes on night and day, or at least what we call night, for
they don't burn gas there, or candles, or anything of that kind; so
that there is no regular going to bed and getting up; you just lie down
anywhere when you want to rest, and when you have rested, you wake up
again, and go on with your travels. There is one capital thing about
Fairy Land. There are no doctors there; not one in the whole country.
Consequently nobody is ill, and there are no pills or powders, or
brimstone and treacle, or senna tea, or being kept at home when you want
to go out, or being obliged to go to bed early and have gruel instead
of cake and sweetmeats. They don't want the doctors, because if you cut
your finger it gets well directly, and even when people are killed, or
are turned into stones, or when anything else unpleasant happens, it can
all be put right in a minute or two. All you have to do when you are in
trouble is to go and look for some wrinkled old woman in a patched old
brown cloak, and be very civil to her, and to do cheerfully and kindly
any service she asks of you, and then she will throw off the dark cloak,
and become a young and beautiful Fairy Queen, and wave her magic wand,
and everything will fall out just as you would like to have it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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